Rowhouse Rehab: Part I

Last week, we bought a house. After closing, my husband and I were euphoric, toasting over champagne as we talked bottom-freezer benefits and envisioned our antique armoire in the living room.

Mired in renovations, we now feel like it might be years before we reach such a stage. Our purchase was a 1927 Georgian rowhouse in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens known for its diversity, restaurants and prewar housing stock such as co-ops built around large gardens. We are only the third owners of this home. And in a stroke of luck, the previous owner was looking to downsize to a one-bedroom in the neighborhood—precisely what we happened to be selling.

Such transactions, known as “swaps,” are not common, although in this shaky market, I’d expect more people to turn to them. Especially if you are selling a one-bedroom in a city saturated with one-bedrooms. There were incentives, too, for the seller, who had lived in the house for 52 years and done little to it recently. Think orange metal kitchen cabinets and gold sponge paint everywhere. And we’ll save ridding the odor of cat pee for next week’s post.

Ken Maldonado for The Wall Street Journal

Inside our Georgian rowhouse.

We welcomed the home’s state because it made it more affordable. We paid $670,000 for a four bedroom with 2½ baths, a garage and a little yard—five blocks from the subway. We also saw an opportunity to preserve, restore and salvage a piece of a neighborhood we love. Among my immigrant father’s first homes in the U.S.—not counting the YMCA on the Upper West Side where he first stayed in 1971—is 13 blocks from our new house. Sometimes, I suspect my decision to settle in Jackson Heights puzzles him, since he worked so hard to get out and buy a house in the suburbs.

Nitin Mukul

One of our projects: Restoring the 1950s metal cabinets.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be chronicling our quest to rehabilitate our rowhouse. Wall Street Journal readers might see some similarities with my colleague Julia Angwin’s Brownstone Diary, but we’re not quite as ambitious as she. Our goal is to move into the home within the next two weeks, then do what we can while we’re in it.

Friends warn me this will be a lifelong endeavor. But my husband and I have always preferred houses with some history in them (this is our fifth, and maybe last, transaction). I suspect it’s a rejection of my New Jersey McMansion rearing.

To get a better sense of this house’s past, I turned to Daniel Karatzas, an agent with Beaudoin Realty Group and the local historian. He wrote the book, “Jackson Heights – A Garden in the City,” which sits on our coffee table. Well, it used to. Now it’s in storage.

Our house, Karatzas told me, was designed by Robert Tappan, “one of those unsung architects” who helped develop the neighborhood into a slice of suburbia just a few miles from midtown Manhattan.

“It wasn’t like Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Karatzas. “They were building traditional styles that would appeal to upper middle-class families. They used vernacular architecture. … Tudor, French, Georgian. That made it seem the houses had been there longer than they had.”

The houses on my block first sold for between $24,000 and $28,000. If he had to liken it to a modern-day phenomenon, Karatzas said, our 1920s house might have once been considered like “those McMansions in New Jersey.”

Oh dear, I thought. I was following in my parents’ footsteps after all.